Coming on the heels of the recent news that the Avoca River is actually still full of shite, piss and septic jam rags, typically fractious Fine in Failure and independent councillors and TDs reached across the aisle in a bipartisan effort to restore faith in the newly half-operational love child of state ineptitude, multi-million euro wastewater treatment plant. The professional managerial class of Uisce Éireann architects, contractors, consultants and comms teams were so busy wanking each other off over fawning press kit Guardian articles and the obligatory tsunami of “on time and under budget” performance-related bonuses that they all forgot to notice the minor detail that the project wasn’t actually “on time or under budget” in the first place!
“If it weren’t for those fuckin meddlesome Sea Scouts, we would have gotten away with it,” declared an exasperated Uisce Eireann™ spokesperson. “We had already gotten away with the sneakiest rebranding since the Blue Shirts reinvented themselves into Fine Gael when we also shed our Irish Water protest python skin to magically become the cute and cuddly Uisce Eireann™. Admittedly, this may have made us a bit cockier than usual in trying to bullshit (pun intended) the country bumpkins of Ark low that their cathedral of crap resembled more of an airport chapel of crap.”
Councillor Billy Fitzbollocks was decidedly more positive in his outlook on the whole shitstorm (pun intended):
“Listen, my party invented sleeveen, stroke politics so the Fine in Failure party will at least grant Irish Water, I mean Uisce Eireann™, an official Arklow Municipal District pardon. The amount of excrement still seeping into the river is negligible anyway, and, to prove it, I will skinny dip in the river this coming Saturday and even take a sup of the sacred Avoca waters like my Hindu brethren of the Ganges do.”
Your humble narrator ventured down to South Quay that Saturday to witness Cllr. Fitzbollocks fulfilling his electoral promise. A crowd of Trumpian quantities watched and waited with bated breath as Fitzbollocks dipped his gold-plated chalice (signifying his multiple pensions/salaries/income streams) into the still rancid, filthy Avoca River to withdraw a precious measure of gloopy, tar-like Uisce Eireann™-approved ‘clean water.’ As the brown envelope-funded goblet kissed his pursed lips, he anticipated a rush of the world-renowned, life-giving qualities of the Avoca, but much to the dismay of most- but certainly not all-of the onlooking crowd he instead shriveled and rotted into an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade-esque mummified corpse, leaving behind in his ashes only a blood-soaked, bloated diary revealing thousands of euro in undeclared rental income from his ruthlessly exploited tenants.
